Blasphemy, prudence, slavery: Ethics in law and literature in the age of Emerson

In legal opinions and literary texts between 1830 and 1860, the concepts of blasphemy and prudence played key roles in a broad cultural debate: should moral behavior in American society derive chiefly from religious principles or from a more recently evolved ethics based on reasonableness? Industrialization, Jacksonian democracy, and an increasing reluctance to punish religious infidelity all combined to make American culture increasingly secular. In the 1830s Tocqueville saw American politics as resting upon a Christian consensus. By 1860, the ground of that consensus had become more pragmatic and humanistic.;This shift is mirrored in the law of the period. In 1838, in Commonwealth v. Kneeland, Massachusetts enforced its blasphemy law for the last time. Twelve years later, in Brown v. Kendall, Massachusetts adopted the prudent person standard of fault in torts cases. Chapter One examines Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw, who wrote the opinions in both Kneeland and Brown and was also Melville's father-in-law. Shaw's Unitarian faith led him to prefer social duty to religious dogma. In these cases, he strove to infuse the law with a moral vision that placed strong emphasis on social utility.;Chapter Two, which considers Emerson's engagement with prudence and blasphemy, illustrates Emerson's discomfort with the morality of prudence, which he saw as incapable of fostering inner character. Emerson rejected law both as a profession and as a moral guide. In Nature, "Prudence," and other works, he sought a spiritual law to compensate for the shortcomings of laws that provide only external restraint. A section on "The Divinity School Address" examines Emerson's exploration of religious infidelity.;Chapter Three addresses Melville and offers readings of Moby-Dick, Pierre, and two of The Piazza Tales as they relate to blasphemy and prudence. Disaffected by popular attitudes toward law and religion, Melville resorted to blasphemy in resistance to prudent conformity. He sought an ethics that would combine prudent practicality with Christian charity---two notions that, he hoped, by their own contradictions could be made to correspond.;The final chapter deals with Fugitive Slave Law and Shaw's opinion in Thomas Sims' Case, in which Shaw became the first judge in the nation to uphold the Law. The remaining pages discuss the work of Frederick Douglass and his ideas of the role of religion in both repression and reform. I see Douglass as a cultural conservative, using natural law and Christian consensus as means to achieving emancipation and equality.